[throwaway6497]

I will always remember him as the guy who would willingly collude with other mentees of Bill Campbell to not hire engineers from each others companies. Willingly trying to keep the salaries of engineers low is pure evil. They even tried to rope-in Zuckerberg into this gentleman's agreement. Zuck asked them to buzz off. When Eric is involved in shady practices like these, how do all other leaders on twitterverse who are singing his praises justify their pandering. I wonder if Eric would have survived now as a Google CEO. Half the company would walk out today, if they came to know Sundar is in bed with his other CEO buddies and has agreements not to poach employees from each other's companies.

[simonh]

You know how far you are over the ethical line when Zuck tells you to take your shady scheme elsewhere.

[patrec]

More likely Zuck correctly saw that Google as the incumbent had much more to gain from such a scheme. Facebook wouldn't be where it is today without aggressively poaching employees from Google, in their early acquiring tech chops phase they were basically the inofficial open source arm of Google because they hired so many googlers who wrote near 1-to-1 clones of internal Google tech and later also released them as open source long before Google ever got around to releasing the real thing (buck, thrift, ...). These days of course, Facebook itself is a powerhouse of original tech.

[Lucadg]

Sounds like the "let's do evil" guy

[crististm]

He actually mocked an early engineer who voiced the "this is evil" mantra in a meeting after he joined Google. If not right then, definitely in a TV interview a few years later.

[loblollyboy]

Pure evil lmao

[mises]

If Google and other companies did this, the employees ought to unionize. Normally I am not in favor of that, but Google et al. were colluding to gain an unfair advantage on their side; that invited the same on the labor side. Companies colluding to keep wages low means workers ought to collude to make them higher and counterbalance the companies.

[codemac]

He's still going to serve on the "compensation committee"..

[ok-repl]

Those poor underpaid Googlers

[nnq]

...higher salaries in one place tend to pull up salaries elsewhere too. And conversely, if you push down the top, you also push down the middle (under the optimistic assumption that the bottom can't go any further down...).

Also, it's easy for other industries to then justify with: "hey, even Google is doing it, and they were they guys supposed to 'do not evil', amirite?".

That's the problem with unethical behavior, we're all into copying and generalizing stuff :|

[Teever]

Collusion like that puts a downward pressure on the wages of all workers.

It also normalizes that behavior and makes it more likely that other employers will take similar steps.

[cerberusss]

You don't have to feel sorry for them, while still disagree about the non-poaching agreements that these CEOs made.

[eli_gottlieb]

An injury to one is an injury to all.

[rapsey]

Sorry but this is just hopelessly naive and one sided. Sillicon valley is more then google and apple, and if the competition is only between them with regards to salary then those engineers have nothing to complain about.

[lsc]

>Sillicon valley is more then google and apple

It is... but the top tier companies pay dramatically more than the next tier down. Like, we're talking 30-50% difference once you count total comp.

(it's interesting, base salary is somewhat comparable... but stock and bonus are a big part of comp if you work at a FAANG company, and those... largely don't exist at third-tier companies.)

The top-tier employers also do a lot to bring up salary pressure on the lower tiers; if the FAANG companies didn't pay so much, the most desirable people wouldn't leave the lower paying companies, wouldn't make room for someone less desirable, etc... That's how I got my start; I didn't go to college, but I did work my way up through those smaller companies, into larger companies that paid better and better.

[Haga]

Yes, those quary workers should stop all that ranting. What have the Roman's not ever done for us.